The Persona of Czeslaw Milosz considers the poetry of Milosz in the innovative light of world literature and comparative literary studies. The author employs critical debates about Milosz in American and English literature to reshape the image of his reception. The book masterfully elaborates Milosz's poetics of perspectivism with a new method of analysis based on the category of authorial persona-between reception, poetics, and close-reading-separate from the literary persona. Each chapter encapsulates introductory information about Polish literature and moves beyond the horizon of Western...

This book is the first monograph that provides a wholesome overview of the history of Antisemitism in Poland. The author critically analyzes the Polish manifestation of the gruesome phenomenon against the backdrop of historical events in all Europe, as she traces the formation of the ideology and its difference from Judeophobia. A special notion requires the author's meticulousness in research of the archives referring to the Catholic Church and folk culture. Most importantly, she does not end with the historical perspective but uses her studies to shed light on the events permeating in the...

The book presents a theory of relationships between the forms of devotion and early drama genres. The historical background is the circumstances of the Church becoming independent of the Empire. A theological and philosophical aspect of the transformation of piety at the time was the specification of the ontological status of the sacred (spiritualization) and "shifting it to Heaven" (transcendentalization). In opposition to a theory of Western civilization as a process of increasing individual self-control, the author argues for the need to take into account purely religious conditions (the...

Kazimierz Moczarski (1907-1975) was a journalist, soldier, and political prisoner. His life exemplifies a Central European biography under Nazism and Comunism. The addictive and moving Civility in Uncivil Times reveals the story of a man who defended law and democracy all his life. Moczarski fought for it in the authoritarian Poland of the 1930s. During the Second World War, he partook in the resistance movement. After the war, he spent eleven years in a Stalinist prison, including nine months in one cell with the Nazi Jurgen Stroop, who commanded the brutal pacification of the Warsaw Ghetto....

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the entirety of Wislawa Szymborska's poetic oeuvre. The author employs in-depth historical reflection on Szymborska's beginnings to reveal that - without describing her post-war beginnings and reflecting on her early entanglement in socialist realist newspeak - Szymborska's mature anti-dogmatic attitude will remain unclear. The book shows how Szymborska's rhetoric and stylistics - figures of reservation, negation, contradiction, tautology, and repetition - are closely connected with the construction of the poetic world and affect the shape of her...